Qualified buyers

In his book EntreLeadership, Dave Ramsey discusses the 4 steps to making a sale. These steps must be taken in the right order for a sale to happen.

The first step is to ensure that we have a qualified buyer. A qualified buyer is someone who has the time, the money, the authority and, most importantly for our discussion, a need or a want. No qualified buyer, no sale.

As E&C professionals, we need to make sure that we sell our ideas and services to qualified buyers in the organization we serve. The manager who is too busy to meet with us, who doesn’t have the budget for the new software we are pitching, who can’t make the call on the new direction of a program is not a qualified buyer. More importantly, we need a leader who understands the importance of ethics and compliance for her organization – who wants what we have to sell. It doesn’t matter how much rapport we have with a manager, how much information we provide, we won’t close our deal if they are not qualified (rapport, education and close are the other three steps in making a sale).

Finding a qualified buyer in our organization is critical because we are all sellers.

Who is your qualified buyer?